FSF-funded call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
FSF-funded call for white papers on philosophical and legal questions around Copilot
[Front] Posted Jul 29, 2021 21:36 UTC (Thu) by jake
On its blog, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has
announced
a call for white papers about GitHub
Copilot and the questions surrounding
it. The FSF will pay $500 for papers that it publishes because they
"help elucidate the problem
":
We can see that Copilot's use of freely licensed software has many implications for an incredibly large portion of the free software community. Developers want to know whether training a neural network on their software can really be considered fair use. Others who may be interested in using Copilot wonder if the code snippets and other elements copied from GitHub-hosted repositories could result in copyright infringement. And even if everything might be legally copacetic, activists wonder if there isn't something fundamentally unfair about a proprietary software company building a service off their work.